Signature's August Wilson Season -- All Tickets $15
Signature's August Wilson Season -- All Tickets $15
Signature's August Wilson Season -- All Tickets $15#0
Posted: 6/22/05 at 8:34pm
From the Times:
"The Signature Theater Company, the Off Broadway troupe known for devoting entire seasons to a single playwright, has laid out its plans for its 15th-anniversary season. It will include a new play by August Wilson, old plays by August Wilson and a one-man show by August Wilson, starring August Wilson.
But perhaps its most interesting element - besides Mr. Wilson, of course - is its other constant: a $15 ticket for each and every seat.
The deal, announced yesterday by the company's artistic director, James Houghton, is a result of a three-year courtship between the Signature and Time Warner, which is underwriting the tickets.
"Time Warner's major philanthropic goal is to make arts accessible," Mr. Houghton said. "And we have always felt there's a kind of civic responsibility to make theater affordable."
At $15 the Signature tickets will run about the price of a movie and soda. (And a small soda at that.) Most Off Broadway companies, looking at declines in corporate, public and private giving, have steadily raised prices in recent years, with seats now regularly going for $50 or more. (The Signature generally charges $55.) On Broadway, orchestra seats commonly go for $100, while premium tickets can reach nearly $500.
The deal was met with admiration among other nonprofit leaders, who usually rely on ticket sales to provide at least half of their yearly budgets.
Lynn Moffat, the managing director of New York Theater Workshop, which offers $20 seats on Sunday nights, said that for nonprofits it was impossible to consistently keep prices that low without a large gift. "There's no way you can survive on earned income and do the kind of work we do," Ms. Moffat said.
Mr. Houghton would not say how much Time Warner had pledged, but acknowledged that "the only way this can happen is through major support." With the Signature's $2.7 million yearly budget, he said, "even at full capacity we only cover 60 percent of our expenses."
The $15 ticket is also a surprising salvo in the battle between ticket buyers and ticket sellers over ever-higher prices. At the same time, however, many outlets for cheaper seats have also increased, ranging from such traditional half-price spots as the Theater Development Fund's TKTS booth in Duffy Square to the Internet, where theater-related Web sites regularly offer deals. Broadway has also made a few attempts to control prices, offering some industrywide discounts during the winter and promotions like Kids' Night on Broadway, which gives a free ticket to a child for every full-price ticket sold to an adult.
Ticket prices are regularly cited as a major hindrance to developing new audiences, particularly young people. Last fall the Royal National Theater in London, working with Travelex, a foreign-exchange company, completed a successful program offering tens of thousands of £10 tickets (about $17), increasing attendance by 11 percent over the previous season and actually turning a small profit. Nicholas Hytner, the artistic director, said at the time that a third of the audience for the £10 "Henry V" had never been to the National before.
Mr. Houghton said that he was well aware of the National's success and hoped to emulate it. "We're not reinventing the wheel here," he said."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/23/theater/newsandfeatures/23sign.html?
re: Signature's August Wilson Season -- All Tickets $15#1
Posted: 6/22/05 at 8:41pmI guess the new play is the final one in his series? Can we still hope for it to make it into a broadway house? Not that I'm knocking the off-broadway venue (who can argue with $15?), but I think that the final play in a monumental series should play in a broadway house. Anyone care to clarify?
re: Signature's August Wilson Season -- All Tickets $15#2
Posted: 6/22/05 at 8:46pmActually, Radio Golf is on track to go to Broadway as early as this Spring. Wilson has said that he's already in the process of writing his next play (a comedy and the first one after the cycle) and that's probably the new play for Signature. Remember, the Signature season doesn't even begin until September 2006 and will continue through the summer of 2007 -- plenty of time to complete whatever he's begun working on now.
re: Signature's August Wilson Season -- All Tickets $15#3
Posted: 6/22/05 at 8:50pm
Good.
I remember Brantly remarking that if someone or some group could not manage to do a festival of his ten plays once he has finished, theater is in more trouble than we thought.
re: Signature's August Wilson Season -- All Tickets $15#4
Posted: 6/22/05 at 9:17pm
I wish Signature could do the whole cycle. I'm not sure how many plays they're going to do, but last year's Vogel season only included three plays. Even with the Time Warner deal, I'd be surprised if they could afford to do more than four or five (including his one-man show) - they've never done more than that, even with equally prolific playwrights like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.
I'd love for Lincoln Center or another major not-for-profit (the Kennedy Center, maybe since they did such a great job with the Sondheim Festival and the Williams Festival?) to take on all ten in rep someday. Since Wilson has a core of about two dozen or so actors who have done multiple plays of his, both on Broadway and regionally, it would be terrific if a major theatre could pull a lot of them together as rep company for a few months. His plays are relatively simple to stage physically (usually one set) and have fairly small casts (6 to 8 actors, typically), so it's not impossible. Obviously, though, rehearsing and then performing TEN plays in rep would be a MAJOR undertaking -- financially and artistically.
It would likely require a LOT of corporate underwriting for it to be able to happen. But, c'mon, somebody HAS to do it at some point. Wilson's cycle is one of the greatest achievements in the history of the American theatre -- others have tried to create such large play cycles before (O'Neill notably, but when he realized he couldn't finish it, he burned most of the manuscripts before he died), but Wilson is the only one to have pulled it off.
Broadway Legend Joined: 7/13/03
re: Signature's August Wilson Season -- All Tickets $15#5
Posted: 6/22/05 at 9:21pmRegardless, that is amazing TW provided a large enough contribution to subsidize so much of the cost. I love TW...they sponsor this...and Bway Under the Stars. Real philanthropic efforts, even if I have to deal with their advertising everywhere.
re: Signature's August Wilson Season -- All Tickets $15#6
Posted: 6/22/05 at 9:22pm
Just re-read the rest of the article:
"The cheap seats will debut with a couple of non-August Wilson works at the Signature's Peter Norton Theater on West 42nd Street: "The Trip to Bountiful," the Southern-mama drama by Horton Foote, opening in November; and John Guare's "Landscape of the Body," his 1977 comic time-bender about a murder in Greenwich Village, due in February. The company will also present a staged reading of Adrienne Kennedy's adaptation of "Madame Bovary." Those productions will precede the Wilson season, which starts in September 2006 with a revival of "Two Trains Running," to be followed by "How I Learned What I Learned," Mr. Wilson's one-man show about his experiences growing up in Pittsburgh, and a marathon reading of all 10 plays in his 20th-century cycle about the African-American experience. The season will be completed by an as-yet-untitled new play by Mr. Wilson, to be produced in February 2007."
So, we'll get Two Trains, his solo show, a marathon reading of all ten plays and then they'll produce his new play that February. OK ..........
I'd still like to see them all staged at some point.
re: Signature's August Wilson Season -- All Tickets $15#7
Posted: 6/22/05 at 9:33pmI want a revival of Joe Turner's Come and Gone.
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